Selecting Women, Electing Women

Political Representation and Candidate Selection in Latin America

Magda Hinojosa

Publication Year: 2012

Selecting Women, Electing Women is a groundbreaking book that examines how the rules for candidate selection affect women’s political representation in Latin America. Focusing particularly on Chile and Mexico, Magda Hinojosa presents counterintuitive assumptions about factors that promote the election of women. She argues that primaries—which are regularly thought of as the most democratic process for choosing candidates—actually produce fewer female nominees than centralized and seemingly exclusionary candidate selection procedures.

Hinojosa astutely points out the role of candidate selection processes in explaining variation in women’s representation that exists both across and within political parties. Selecting Women, Electing Women makes critical inroads to the study of gender and politics, candidate selection, and Latin American politics.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generosity of the
many women and men in Chile and Mexico who shared their stories
with me. All of them taught me so much—from national political
elites with decades of experience to newly minted municipal council members
who had never faced an interviewer’s questions...

1. Electing Women: Female Political Representation in Latin America

In March 2006, Michelle Bachelet was sworn in as president of Chile. The
following year neighboring Argentina also elected a woman to the presidency:
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who took office in December 2007.
These women seemed to have little in common. Bachelet had never held
elected office prior to beginning...

Women’s political underrepresentation results from bottlenecks at
different points in the process of becoming an officeholder. There
are four stages in this process, as Figure 2.1 illustrates.1 Stage 1
marks the move from being a part of the general population to becoming
an eligible (anyone who is legally allowed...

3. How Selection Matters: A Theoretical Framework

The discussion of the four stages on the path to office holding in Chapter
2 focuses on the first and last stages. The chapter’s analysis of the
first stage debunks supply explanations that blame women’s underrepresentation
on a lack of “qualified” women to run for office. The data
presented on marriage, fertility, education...

4. The Paradox of Primaries: Inclusive-Decentralized Selection

Political primaries have been adopted en masse in recent years (see Field
and Siavelis 2008 for examples from across the globe and Alcántara
Sáez 2002 for information about Latin America) in response to the
consensus that primaries are a means of increasing “openness and internal
party democracy, and therefore normatively...

5. Inclusive-Centralized and Exclusive-Decentralized Selection

Despite the growing use of inclusive-decentralized selection procedures,
in particular primaries, for choosing candidates, parties continue to
routinely select candidates using processes that are inclusive-centralized
or exclusive-decentralized. These two types of candidate-selection
procedures are on opposite ends of Figure 3.2, meaning that they each allow
women to avoid one of the two...

Through her own “personal force,” Evita Perón was able to augment
Argentine women’s representation in Congress, making Argentina the
world leader in women’s congressional representation in the mid-1950s
(Jones 1996: 77). U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson significantly increased
his appointment of women after hearing...

7. Selecting Candidates Closer to Home: Widows, Wives, and Daughters

Chapter 1 began with the story of Cristina Fernández, who succeeded
her husband to become president of Argentina in 2007. Fernández
had been active in politics since joining the youth wing of the Peronista
Party in the 1970s. After the return to democracy...

More than two-thirds of Latin American countries have adopted gender
quotas since 1991, radically altering selection procedures to set
aside a portion of candidacies for women; well-written quota laws
have had dramatic results. Table 8.1 provides information on nationally
mandated quotas in Latin America...

9. Candidate Selection and Women’s Representation in Latin American Politics

This book began with the stories of Cristina Fernández’s and Michelle
Bachelet’s paths to the presidencies of their respective nations. These
accounts illustrate that candidate selection is instrumental to understanding
women’s representation: the selection stage can be more important
than the election stage. Candidate selection...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.